Three including two women killed for honour

LAHORE: The second incident of honour killing of 2004 on Saturday claimed three more lives including two women in the Manga Mandi police precincts.
Muhammad Labha from Sandha had allegedly developed illicit relations with Shakura Bibi, wife of Ishfaq, a landlord of Loharanwala Khu in Sunder.
Shakura's husband became furious on seeing his wife with another man in a compromising position in a room in the neighbourhood. He picked up his rifle and opened fire on them, as a result both died instantly. After hearing the gunshots, neighbour Kubra tried to overpower Mr Ishfaq but he also shot her dead and escaped.
The bodies were removed to the city mortuary for an autopsy. Police has registered a case on the complaint of Kubra's brother Mushtaq.
The first honour killing took place in the Burki police precincts in which a youth stabbed his elder sister Shabana, 17, suspecting that she had developed illicit relations with a neighbour.
Muhammad Imran of Village Tera stabbed her to death after exchanging hot words with her."

Malaysian city rules on women

By Jonathan Kent
BBC in Kuala Lumpur
The Islamic government in the Malaysian city of Kuala Terengganu has laid down strict new laws about what non-Muslim women can wear to work.
The rules, which ban even moderately revealing clothing, are an unprecedented attempt to impose the party's values on the personal lives of non-believers in Malaysia.
Malaysia's opposition Islamic party, PAS, has been trying to convince the country's non-Muslims that it will respect their way of life in those areas where it holds power.
But new rules from the PAS-controlled city council in Kuala Terengganu governing how women should dress for work will undermine that claim.
Even non-Muslims will be banned from wearing short sleeved blouses, tight jeans, skirts with slits, or skirts cut above the knee.
Muslim women will have to wear a tudong, a headscarf drawn tightly about the face.
The traditional loosely draped Malay headscarf will be banned and the rules will apply to all work places.
With an election on the horizon, this move will be leapt on by the national government as proof that PAS will trample on the freedoms of non-Muslim Malaysians who make up almost half the population.
PAS has proposed a two-tier system, where Islamic hudud laws will be imposed only on Muslims in states where they are in a large majority.
However recent moves in Terengganu - one of two states controlled by PAS - point to a more conservative agenda.
The state government has decided to close down karaoke lounges and snooker halls and to bar Muslims from all premises where liquor is sold.
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I never find a need to comment on any of these news.

Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam

excerpts from Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam
By Koenraad Elst
Published By The Voice Of India
New Delhi, India
Negation of the Historical role of Muslims in India
Since about 1920 an effort has been going on in India to rewrite history and to deny the millennium-long attack of Islam on Hinduism. Today, most politicians and English-writing intellectuals in India will go out of their way to condemn any public reference to this long and painful conflict in the strongest terms. They will go to any length to create the illusion of a history of communal amity between Hindus and Muslims.
no one has yet made the effort of tabulating the reported massacres and proposing a reasonable estimate of how many millions exactly must have died in the course of the Islamic campaign against Hinduism (such research is taboo). On top of these there is a similar number of abductions and deportations to harems and slave-markets, as well as centuries of political oppression and cultural destruction.
The American historian Will Durant summed it up like this:"The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within."
The Muslim conquests, down to the 16th century, were for the Hindus a pure struggle of life and death. Entire cities were burnt down and the populations massacred, with hundreds of thousands killed in every campaign, and similar numbers deported as slaves. Every new invader made (often literally) his hills of Hindus skulls. Thus, the conquest of Afghanistan in the year 1000 was followed by the annihilation of the Hindu population; the region is still called the Hindu Kush, i.e. Hindu slaughter. The Bahmani sultans (1347-1480) in central India made it a rule to kill 100,000 captives in a single day, and many more on other occasions. The conquest of the Vijayanagar empire in 1564 left the capital plus large areas of Karnataka depopulated. And so on.
But the Indian Pagans were far too numerous and never fully surrendered. What some call the Muslim period in Indian history, was in reality a continuous war of occupiers against resisters, in which the Muslim rulers were finally defeated in the 18th century. Against these rebellious Pagans the Muslim rulers preferred to avoid total confrontation, and to accept the compromise which the (in India dominant) Hanifite school of Islamic law made possible. Alone among the four Islamic law schools, the school of Hanifa gave Muslim rulers the right not to offer the Pagans the sole choice between death and conversion, but to allow them toleration as zimmis (protected ones) living under 20 humiliating conditions, and to collect the jizya (toleration tax) from them.
It is because of Hanifite law that many Muslim rulers in India considered themselves exempted from the duty to continue the genocide on the Hindus (self-exemption for which they were persistently reprimanded by their mullahs). Moreover, the Turkish and Afghan invaders also fought each other, so they often had to ally themselves with accursed unbelievers against fellow Muslims. After the conquests, Islamic occupation gradually lost its character of a total campaign to destroy the Pagans. Many Muslim rulers preferred to enjoy the revenue from stable and prosperous kingdoms, and were content to extract the jizya tax, and to limit their conversion effort to material incentives and support to the missionary campaigns of sufis and mullahs (in fact, for less zealous rulers, the jizya was an incentive to discourage conversions, as these would mean a loss of revenue). The Moghul dynasty (from 1526 onwards) in effect limited its ambition to enjoying the zimma system, similar to the treatment of Jews and Christians in the Ottoman empire. Muslim violence would thenceforth be limited to some slave-taking, crushing the numerous rebellions, destruction of temples and killing or humiliation of Brahmins, and occasional acts of terror by small bands of raiders. A left-over from this period is the North-Indian custom of celebrating weddings at midnight: this was a safety measure against the Islamic sport of bride-catching.
Modern India
There is a strange alliance between the Indian Communist parties and the Muslim fanatics. In the forties the Communists gave intellectual muscle and political support to the Muslim League's plan to partition India and create an Islamic state. After independence, they successfully combined (with the tacit support of Prime minister Nehru) to sabotage the implementation of the constitutional provision that Hindi be adopted as national language, and to force India into the Soviet-Arab front against Israel.
Under Nehru's rule these Marxists acquired control of most of the educational and research institutes and policies.
Moreover, they had an enormous mental impact on the Congress apparatus: even those who formally rejected the Soviet system, thought completely in Marxist categories.
After postulating that conflicts between Hindus and Muslims as such were non-existent before the modern period, the negationists are faced with the need to explain how this type of conflict was born after centuries of a misunderstood non-existence. The Marxist explanation is a conspiracy theory: the separate communal identity of Hindus and Muslims is an invention of the sly British colonialists. They carried on a divide and rule policy, and therefore they incited the communal separateness. As the example par excellence, prof. R.S. Sharma mentions the 19th-century 8-volume work by Elliott and Dowson, The History of India as Told by its own Historians. This work does indeed paint a very grim picture of Muslim hordes who attack the Pagans with merciless cruelty. But this picture was not a concoction by the British historians: as the title of their work says, they had it all from indigenous historiographers, most of them Muslims.
Yet, the negationist belief that the British newly created the Hindu-Muslim divide has become an article of faith with everyone in India who calls himself a secularist.

A girl is like a glass plate

Sirhan Abdulla's 16-year-old sister Yasmine was a victim of rape. This brought unbearable shame to the family.

Am I the only one who cannot even begin to grasp how a girl's rape would shame a family? Maybe they are ashamed that she was inadequately protected. Maybe they feel horrible that they were not there for her and desperately want to become stronger to protect their remaining daughters. But nooooooo

'We were in hell,' recalled Abdulla. 'It was like we were being turned on a spit. My father got diabetes from the stress. My mother got diabetes from the stress. It was all because of this problem.' As news spread through the community, Yasmine knew she faced certain death. With no safe place to go, police placed her into protective custody. And nearly a month later, she was released to her father. But only after he signed a written guarantee that no harm would come to her.
How soon after her release was Yasmine murdered, her brother was asked? 'After 15 minutes I shot her,' said brother Sirhan Abdulla, adding that he shot her four times in the head. Abdulla served just six months for killing his sister Yasmine. When asked if that was a fair sentence, Abdulla replied no. 'I shouldn't have been in prison for a minute.'
In 2000, a bill was introduced in the Jordanian parliament that would toughen the punishment for honor crimes. It was soundly defeated. 'You have to put limits to the society,' said parliament member Salameh Hiyari, who voted against the bill. Abdulla said he doesn't think about his sister. 'A girl is like a glass plate. Take a glass plate and throw it on the floor and it breaks. Would it be any use anymore or not? A girl is just like that. If she has been violated, she's finished.'"

Bollywood Star's Act Makes Her a Hero, and Possible Target

By John Lancaster
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 23, 2003; Page A16

BOMBAY -- With her dimpled smile and wholesome good looks, Preity Zinta has danced and lip-synced her way into the top ranks of Bollywood stardom. But nothing prepared the 28-year-old daughter of an Indian army officer for the critical acclaim that greeted her latest performance, on the witness stand in a Bombay courtroom.
"Bravo Preity," exclaimed the headline on an editorial in the Indian Express. "Bollywood's Only Real Hero," agreed the Hindustan Times.
The outpouring of praise was prompted by Zinta's willingness to do what no other Bollywood star has until now had the nerve to do: offer evidence about the pervasive influence of organized crime in the increasingly profitable and global Indian film industry.
In a closed court session this month, the details of which were promptly leaked to the press, Preity testified that she had been the target of an extortion threat two years ago by a man claiming to represent Chota Shakeel, a Pakistan-based gangster. Her testimony came in the high-profile trial of Bharat Shah, a leading Bombay diamond merchant and film financier, on charges involving links to the underworld.
Before Zinta's appearance, the prosecution had called a dozen other film personalities to testify, but all had turned uncooperative on the stand, recanting earlier statements or suddenly going fuzzy on key details -- evidence, police say, of the underworld's power to intimidate even the most macho and highly paid stars.
So what prompted India's "Preity Hero," as one headline writer dubbed her, to break the code of silence on the nexus between Bollywood and the mob?
In her first interview since testifying, Zinta owned up to a mixture of motives, from an altruistic desire to "do the right thing" to more pragmatic considerations, such as wanting to "get out of the court" quickly and fearing the legal consequences of contradicting her taped statement to police.
Asked whether she felt her testimony had put her safety at risk, she replied, "for sure," lashing out angrily at law enforcement officials who she believes leaked the details of the supposedly secret court proceeding.
"It was a huge risk I was taking in there, and I expected to be protected," she said, sitting in her office in a Bombay suburb near several of the major studios. "I felt extremely betrayed."
Zinta said she had no wish to launch a personal crusade against underworld influence in Bollywood -- "I wouldn't want it to be made into a big deal, because it's just going to create lots of problems for me in the future" -- and defended fellow stars who have been accused of cultivating chummy relationships with mob bosses based in Karachi, Pakistan, and Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.
"If you meet someone and he comes and says hello, you can't just tell him to take a walk -- you say hello back," she said in her precise, convent-school English. "You think, maybe if I say hello I can leave. Do you know what I'm trying to say? It's a Catch-22 situation. It's not as black and white as we put it. It's not just, 'If you keep away from them you're good, and if you mix with them you're bad.' "
Zinta's ambivalence, to say nothing of her fears, reflects what police officials contend is a high degree of collusion -- some of it voluntary -- between mob figures and some of the biggest names in Bollywood.
As in the Hollywood of an earlier time, crime bosses have long cultivated social ties to the Indian film industry, basking in the reflected glory of its glamorous stars. In the mid-1990s, however, crime syndicates began looking for new sources of revenue following the collapse of the Bombay real estate market, which had provided them with money through extortion and other means, according to police officials here.
Bollywood was an obvious target. Churning out roughly 900 feature films a year, the industry's three-hour song-and-dance epics command huge audiences both in India and around the world, especially since the advent of new technologies such as satellite television and DVDs. At the same time, Indian filmmakers have had difficulty financing their projects by conventional means because India's government-owned banks had refused to lend them money until 2000, when the government changed its policy.
Crime syndicates were only too happy to step into the breach, offering loans to producers at rates of up to 36 percent, police say. "Anyone who has money could enter into Bollywood and start a movie," said D. Sivanandhan, an Indian Eliot Ness who investigated organized crime in the movie industry as a joint police commissioner, a job he has since left. "There were no qualifications, no entry fees. It was a wide-open field."
One of the most important mob financiers is alleged to be Shakeel, whose name turns up repeatedly in the Shah case and who is thought to be living in Karachi. Based on transcripts of telephone conversations that were secretly recorded by police and leaked to the Indian press last summer, Shakeel appears to be on good terms with a number of India's top producers, directors and stars, with whom he discusses financing arrangements and sometimes even creative issues.
"Be careful during mixing when you cut scenes," he tells one prominent director, who replies, "Yes sir. Yes sir."
Shakeel also chats amiably with Sanjay Dutt, a top Bollywood star who is facing criminal charges for alleged links to Pakistan-based gangsters blamed for a series of bomb blasts that killed 257 people here in 1993. When Dutt complains about another actor's habit of showing up late on the set, according to the transcript, Shakeel laughs and tells him not to worry: "He will be punctual in our project."
Crime bosses have also regarded Bollywood personalities as ripe targets for extortion, and those who don't cooperate can play a heavy price. A top music executive was killed by mob hit men in 1997. And in 2000, armed assailants shot and wounded Rakesh Roshan, a director and the father of heartthrob actor Hrithik Roshan. The director was allegedly targeted for refusing a gangster's demand to line up Hrithik's services for a movie he was backing.
Such episodes have contributed to an atmosphere of fear among Bollywood's glitterati, some of whom are under full-time police protection. (Zinta said she was offered protection after her testimony but declined for the sake of her privacy.)
For law enforcement officials, nothing so captures the corrosive influence of organized crime in Bollywood as the case against Shah, the diamond merchant-turned-movie mogul who owns a fleet of BMWs and reportedly paid 300,000 rupees, about $6,250, for an autographed pillowcase used by Michael Jackson during a stay at Bombay's Oberoi Hotel. The court case turns on allegations that Shah helped an associate of Shakeel's -- another Karachi-based crime boss named Dawood Ibrahim -- in an extortion scheme. Shah, who is currently free on bail, has denied any wrongdoing.
The case has also brought to light allegations of mob involvement in the making of "Chori Chori, Chupke Chupke," in which Zinta played a leading role. During the shooting of the film, Zinta received a phone call from a man who claimed to be an associate of Shakeel's, ordering her to pay 5 million rupees, about $104,000, or "face consequences," according to details of her testimony that were leaked.
Zinta declined to discuss the specifics of her testimony but confirmed the essential thrust of the reports. In the transcript of his phone conversation with Dutt, Shakeel denies threatening Zinta, telling the actor, "I will never demand money from the female species."
Zinta is in some respects an unlikely star. The daughter of an Indian army colonel who has since died, she was raised on military bases and attended a convent boarding school. She holds an English degree from Delhi University and pursued advanced studies in criminal psychology. One brother is a major in an armored unit currently stationed near the hostile frontier dividing Indian and Pakistani forces in Kashmir; another brother sells cars in Petaluma, Calif.
In person, Zinta projects a high degree of confidence, greeting a visitor with a direct gaze and a hearty handshake. Demurely pretty in a pink sweater and flowered skirt, she said she stumbled into acting largely by accident, though she seems to have adapted comfortably to the role. She lives in a luxury high-rise, tools around town in a black Lexus sport-utility vehicle and vacations in places such as Cannes and Sydney. The details of her romantic life, including a recent breakup with a top model, are breathlessly chronicled in the Indian press; she is currently dating a Danish engineer named Lars.
While Zinta's testimony is at best peripheral to the Shah case, police say she deserves credit for helping to shine a light on the extent of mob influence in Bollywood -- an important step in cleaning up the industry.
Perhaps because the job has yet to be completed, Zinta isn't exactly welcoming the attention. "I had a lot of people telling me I was very stupid," she said. "One thing everyone told me is, 'Preity, one person can't change the system.' "
The most telling reaction may have come at a television awards ceremony a few days after her court appearance. "I met this guy who walked up to me and said, 'Congratulations, you're the only crazy person in this industry.' "

© 2003 The Washington Post Company